How to Alter Your Blogging Strategy for Changing Trends

Blogging is always in a state of flux as new technology and trends emerge each and every year.

While there are certainly many time-honoured blogging strategies that continue to drive solid results for bloggers, it is also important to consider the current trends to ensure that your blogging strategy is optimized as much as possible.

The key is to give weight to the trends that seem to be here to stay, like the ones below. With that in mind, here are four things that bloggers should change with regard to their current blogging strategy.

This is saying nothing of the fact that longer posts give you the ability to develop your authority on a topic. In short, bloggers need to write longer posts.

This isn’t to say that bloggers should exclusively write longer posts, but that longer posts should definitely be part of your blogging strategy if they aren’t already.

3. SEO: Mobile Optimization and Page Speed

SEO remains as important for every for everyone on the web looking to drive as much traffic to their website as possible. And just like blogging itself, SEO remains just as much in a constant flux as blogging does.

Where bloggers need to alter their SEO efforts, if they haven’t already, is toward mobile optimization. Among Google’s most recent updates is their mobile-first indexing update in response to the number of people now searching on their mobile phone instead of via their desktop.

In brief, Google is now prioritizing the mobile version of websites instead of the desktop version. For now, this means that content on both the mobile version and the desktop version need to the same.

If you have more content on the desktop version than the mobile version, this can actually affect your ranking. So, begin by taking Google’s mobile-friendly test to determine how mobile-friendly your pages are.

The good news is that Google will roll out this update in a way that shouldn’t hinder non-mobile friendly sites, so those who have yet to have a mobile-friendly website have some time to do so, but it is certainly something that they need to think about.

Content upgrades are free resources – similar to the ones listed above – but that pertain to specific blog posts.

Instead of offering a vague course elsewhere on your website, content upgrades take advantage of the people already reading your content on a particular topic. Content upgrades are offered at the end of a blog post.

Here’s an example. If you’re writing a blog post about the anatomy of a great blog post, you might embed a content upgrade at the end (or in the middle) of the post in the form of “5 Bonus Tips to Make Every Blog Post Great” or something to that effect.

The key here is to identify your top performing blog posts and develop a content upgrade for that specific post.

Since you can’t develop content upgrades for every post (that would be time-consuming), concentrating your efforts on your best-performing blogs will allow you to maximize your efforts.

The Bottom Line

Bloggers need to always stay on top of trends if they want to maximize their results. For now, that means incorporating video into your strategy, writing longer posts, beginning to implement mobile optimization and swapping courses for content upgrades.

This post was written by Arash Asli, who is at the forefront of business growth helping SMBs grow their businesses, as CEO of Yocale.com, an online scheduling and marketing platform. His thought leadership has been featured in major publications including Forbes, Huffington Post, and Inc. He is honoured to have been named the Business in Vancouver’s Top Forty under 40 business executive.